In X-ray tomosynthesis, multiple X-ray projections (for instance, mammograms) from different angles are acquired and computationally combined into a 3D tomographic image volume.
Typically, at least one conventional 2D mammogram is also acquired as a reference image. However, this comes at the expense of yet another radiation dosage exposure. Another option is to use a computational method to generate a “synthetic” mammogram view from the available 3D tomographic image volume.
A method to compute synthetic mammograms is based on the maximum-intensity-projection (MIP) approach and is described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,760,924.